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Delivered in Paris at the 2016 International James Baldwin Conference just two weeks before the killing of 49 individuals at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida on 26 June 2016, “Relatively Conscious” explores, through the eyes of an LGBT American and the words of James Baldwin, how separate and unequal life remains for so many within the United States. Written in the tradition of memoir, it recounts how, just as Paris saved Baldwin from himself, the writer’s life was transformedupon the discovery of Baldwin.
This essay reviews Hilton Als’ 2019 exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery. The show visually displays Baldwin in two parts: “A Walker in the City” examines his biography and “Colonialism” examines “what Baldwin himself was unable to do” by displaying the work of contemporary artists and filmmakers whose works resonate with Baldwin’s critiques of masculinity, race, and American empire. Mirakhor explores how Als’ quest to restore Baldwin is part of a long and deep literary and personal conversation that Als has been having since he was in his teens, and in this instance, exploring why and how it has culminated via the visual, instead of the literary. As Mirakhor observes, to be in the exhibit is not to just observe how Als has formed and figured Baldwin, but to see how Baldwin has informed and made Als, one of our most lyrical and impassioned contemporary writers and thinkers.